In a Natchez, Mississippi, gift shop I saw a sign with a dog swilling a pint. It said: “In dog beers, I’ve only had one.” Some days I feel that in newspaper years, I’m 434 years old.
The first column I ever wrote for a real newspaper, albeit a student one, was in February 1973. It appeared in The Auburn Plainsman and was about my feminist heroine, my older sister. Just good investigative reporting.
The Plainsman editor that year was Thom Botsford, who smoked a pipe, played sax and had cool leather patches on his corduroy elbows. I thought of him as wise and ancient.
Our office was in the basement of the oldest campus building at Auburn, Langdon Hall, and Thom’s cubbyhole had a big and screenless window you could climb out of for a lemonade run if the spirit moved.
Thom made a few tactful editorial suggestions about my first attempt at opinion writing, with its strident and simultaneously saccharine tone, and I listened. The following Thursday the improved words appeared in print with my black and white, slightly out-of-register face above them, and a serious habit formed.
Now, 42 years later, I continue to write columns. On writing days I rise early and sit before a blank page and try to think of ways to entertain and inform people I do not know, who no doubt have a radio, television, Internet access and half a dozen magazine subscriptions to allay print boredom.
With each passing week, the column challenge is more daunting. It takes me a little longer to write the same number of words. Some days I am uninspired. I write anyway.
Two things make me feel seriously old. Watching the Academy Awards — who are these stars? — and writing my weekly column.
One recent morning as I was struggling to wake, in that zone between dreams and dread, I thought of the late, great Celestine Sibley, who wrote for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She died in 1999 at age 85, and I was working in Atlanta then. Both of us were writing four pieces a week.
Only difference, Celestine had been writing her column for 55 years. And she’d been in the newspaper business for 66 years. That means I have another 24 years to go to touch her tenure. I’ll never match her eloquence.
Her columns were well-crafted, compelling reading to the end. Writing styles and hotshot columnists, most of them men, came and went, came and went. Celestine kept writing.
At one point it was discovered through another female newspaper employee’s lawsuit that Celestine Sibley was making significantly less than the male columnists on the staff at the same time. But I often got the impression Celestine would have paid the paper if necessary to keep writing. She outlasted most of those male colleagues, anyhow.
So, in Celestine years, I guess I should consider myself a fledgling in the newspaper business, not dated and spent. My friend Celestine would have no sympathy for a news hound’s tail-dragging in only her 42nd year.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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